Recently, online service marketplaces have become increasingly common. Typically, these web sites serve as a bulletin board system to facilitate the initial contact between service buyers and service providers. In most cases, the online marketplace's involvement ends here. In other words, most online service marketplaces play no role in the negotiations for the services, in monitoring the progress of the provision of the services, or in following up with buyers as to the level of satisfaction with the services.
In conventional online service marketplaces, the service provider user accounts are typically “single user” accounts. That is, a service provider company creates an account for itself, but the account does not take into consideration the company's individual technicians, their availability, and their particular skills. While these single user accounts may be perfectly adequate for a sole proprietor, such is not the case with respect to service provider companies having multiple technicians.
This is particularly important from a consumer protection standpoint. For example, Technician X for Company A may do a higher volume of quality work, which is reflected favorably in Company A's buyer feedback. However, Technician Y, a new employee of Company A, may perform sub-standard work. Thus, a buyer who selects Company A as its service provider based on its positive feedback nonetheless runs the risk of Company A assigning the task to a lesser technician (e.g., Technician Y). In other words, a buyer does not have the opportunity to evaluate the individual technicians working for Company A and say, “I want Technician X, not Technician Y.”
Single user accounts are also disadvantageous from a service provider's perspective. In particular, while a service provider company may use the online marketplace as a means for gathering sales leads, the actual delegation to and dispatch of its technicians must be handled internally.
Conventional online service marketplaces also do not offer a sufficiently robust platform to serve the needs of “enterprise” buyers, such as department stores that sell a variety of appliances and home furnishings that may require installation or other services related to the goods. Typically, online service marketplaces focus on a particular service vertical, such as IT. With these types of marketplaces, enterprise buyers are forced to jump around from marketplace to marketplace depending on the type of service needed at any given time. In cases where online service marketplaces do encompass multiple service verticals, such marketplaces are designed with only the simple (e.g., homeowner) buyer in mind. Thus, these marketplaces do not contemplate continuing business relationships between buyers and service providers.